Saudi Arabia's history of hypocrisy we choose to ignore

independent.co.uk

Robert Fisk
7-9 minutes

Sir William Hunter was a senior British civil servant and in 1871 published a book
which warned of fanatic swarms of Sunni Muslims who had murdered our
subjects, financed by men of ample fortune, while a majority of Muslims were
being forced to decide once and for all, whether [they] should play the part of a
devoted follower of Islam or a peaceable subject.

Hunter identified a hate preacher as the cause of this terror, a man inspired on
a visit to Arabia by an ascetic Muslim called Abdul Wahab whose violent Wahabi
followers had formed an alliance with you guessed it the House of Saud.
Hunters 140-year-old volume The Indian Musalmans given a dusting of internet
race hatred, murderous attacks by individual Sunni Muslims, cruel Wahabi-style
punishments and all-too familiar proof of second-class citizenship for Muslims in a
European-run state might have been written today.

Even before Hunters day, the Wahabis captured the holy cities of Arabia and
Isis-style massacred their inhabitants. Like Isis, they even overran Syria. Their
punishments, and those of their Saudi military supporters, make the public lashing
of todays Saudi blogger Raif Badawi appear a minor misdemeanour. Hypocrisy
was a theme of Arabian as well as European history.

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Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam on his liberal
website

In those days, of course, oil had no meaning. The Saudi ruler was dispatched to
Constantinople in 1818 to have his head chopped off by the local superpower
the Ottoman Empire and the European states made no complaint. A young
British army captain later surveyed the destroyed Saudi capital of Diriya close to
modern-day Riyadh with satisfaction. But successive campaigns of Saudi-
Wahabi conquest, and then the swift transition of oil from the vile black naphtha, in
which Arabian sheep regularly drowned, into the blood vessels of the Western
world, meant that the purist Wahabi violence which included the desecration of
mosques, the destruction of ancient Muslim tombs and the murder of infidels
was conveniently separated from the House of Saud and ignored by Europeans
and Americans alike.

Erased, too, is history; including the fact that Mohamed Ibn Saud, the leader of the
Nejd, even married Abdul Wahabs daughter.

Our disregard of present-day Saudi-Wahabi cruelties and venality might astonish

Sir William Hunter; the Wahabi Indian Muslims in his British Empire were led by an
insurrectionist prelate called Sayyid Ahmed whose followers regarded him as the
next Prophet and whose own pilgrimage to Arabia turned him into a life-long
purger of promiscuity. His believers came from Afghanistan as well as India where
his power lay in what is now Pakistan. In fact, he was proclaimed Commander of
the Faithful in Peshawar. His men might have been the Taliban.

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Britains wars against the Wahabis were as ferocious as Europes today, though
far more costly in lives. And if Hunter rightly identified the second-class status,
lack of employment and poor education of the Sunni Muslims of India as a cause
of insurrection France, please take note he also understood that Indias
Muslims were being asked to choose between pure Islam and Queen Victoria.
The Hindus of India and the British rulers were at war with those whom Hunter,
mindful of medieval Christian missions to Jerusalem, caricatured as the
Crescentaders.

Ensaf Haidar, centre, wife of the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, holds a vigil in
Montreal, Quebec, urging Saudi Arabia to free her husband (Getty)

Today, the Americans and Europeans and of course, our own Prime Minister
like to draw a line between the moderate, friendly, pro-Western, oil-wealthy
Saudi Arabians who are praised for denouncing the cowardly terrorist attack in
Paris, and their Crescentader Wahabi friends who behead thieves and drug
dealers after grossly unfair trials, torture their Shia Muslim minorities and lash their
own recalcitrant journalists. The Wahabi Saudis for they are, of course, the
same cry crocodile tears over the murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who
lampoon their religion, while sympathising with the purists in Syria, Iraq and
Afghanistan who slaughter journalists and aid workers, destroy ancient
monuments and enslave women.

All in all, a pretty pass. The Saudis are special, arent they? Fifteen of the 19
hijackers of 9/11 were Saudis and George W Bush immediately arranged for

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leading Saudis (including some from the House of Bin Laden) to be freighted out
of America to safety. Osama was himself a Saudi (later de-citizened). The Taliban
were financed and armed by the Saudis; the Talibans Organisation for the
Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice was identical to the Saudi-
Wahabi religious police in Riyadh and Jeddah. So precious are the Saudis to us,
that Tony Blair was able to close down a British police inquiry into Anglo-Saudi
bribery. National interest was at stake. Ours, of course, not theirs.

And we ignore, amid all this tomfoolery, the spread of Saudi money through the
institutions of Sunni Islam in Asia, in the Balkans take a look at the new Saudi-
designed mosques that mock the wonderful old Ottoman institutions in Bosnia
and in Western Europe. Suggest that the Saudi authorities not, of course, to be
confused with their Wahabi fraternity are supporting Isis, and journalists will be
confronted not by sympathy for their oppressed colleagues, but by threatening
letters from lawyers on behalf of the Saudi government. Even in the Levant, aid
workers are frightened of the school-teaching in Saudi-funded refugee camps for
Syrians.

In pictures: Reaction to Charlie Hebdo attack

As Irish columnist Fintan OToole pointed out this week, there are two words that
must not be spoken in all the official rhetoric about Charlie Hebdos dead: Saudi
Arabia. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot of silence, he wrote. The house
of Saud runs a vicious tyranny that... while the Charlie Hebdo killers were going
about their ultimate acts of censorship... was savagely lashing the blogger Raif
Badawi for daring to promote public debate.

The Wahabi grave smashers threaten to destroy the Prophets tomb as a religious
duty just as they have smashed the graves of saints in Africa and the Middle
East but a cartoon of the Prophet is a provocation that deserves death.

Sure, we all know the rubric. The Saudis stand in the forefront of the war against
terror, arresting, torturing (though well have to go softly on that one) and
imprisoning terrorists, condemning Isis as terrorists, standing behind the
French and the Europeans in their struggle against terror, along with the
Egyptians and the Russians and the Pakistanis and all those other democrats in
their war against terror.

Speak not a word about the Kingdom as a Wahabi-Saudi regime. It would be

wrong to do so. After all, the Wahabis dont call themselves Wahabis, since they
are true Muslims. Which is what the Saudis are, arent they?

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